Crumb and Dick VS the Great Erasures

There is a Modest Mouse lyric I love. The song is Novocain Stain on the seminal album "This is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About." The lyric goes, "More housing developments go up/named after the things they replace/so welcome to Minnow Brook/and welcome to Shady Space/it all seems a little abrupt/No I don't like this change of pace." There is a lot of truth to that. As we try to make the world ours, we destroy what beauty there is in the land of the Native Americas, regions wild and true, not carved up by our many housing tracts. Artist R. Crumb renders the dismal progression of communities in his cartoon A Short History of America with a kind of cunning precision that a writer could take upwards of a dozen pages laboring over. Crumb's city is birthed from trees that gradually disappear from the frames, replaced by buildings, telephone lines, general clutter. As we construct our social infrastructures, what are we destroying? Philip K. Dick, in "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," presents a future where animals will be so scarce that the existence of a sleepy, wizened woodland owl would be an amazing find, worthy of massive corporate costs. I believe Dick and Crumb to be kindred spirits with Isaac Brock. Their shared lamentation is one of fear and disbelief. Our attempts to create our own national consciousness from what we perceive as ripe for our picking (Huckleberry picking, if you will) is an egotistic and ultimately destructive notion. Dick's protagonist feels a "need for a real animal" (453). More than that, what humans require is a real world, a world containing not merely restaurants, bars, sporting goods stores, suburban sprawl, but trees, deer, grassy fields to rest our heads on. The natural world is inextricable from our own. So we have brains capable of building steel obelisks and internationally-spreading forms of communication. Bully for us. Do we have enough oxygen-producers? Are we supporting other forms of sentient life? As the title of another Modest Mouse album suggests (I'm a fan, so sue me) all that most of us care about is the greedy endeavor of unceremoniously "Building Nothing out of Something."